Dogs of Orninica Read online

  They just don't listen to reason. What kind of dog would turn down millions of oonos in favor of releasing to the public domain an invention that will throw our entire way of life into disarray forever? Utterly sickening, the self-righteous turnip-heads running around out there calling themselves intelligent dogs of science. What's intelligent about throwing away something that's been working just fine for generations? I don't even want to think about a world where energy isn't a pricey commodity. It's truly a disgusting concept.

  The only thing more irritating than free-energy devices is the insane amount of cancer miracle cures that keep cropping up. Keeping those from reaching fruition is bleeding corporations all across Orninica dry. Something has to be done about all these cocky inventors eating into our bottom lines. Maybe we should be buying the universities and labs and immediately shutting them down, instead of allowing the little bloodsuckers to continue to operate.

  The very least we can do is lobby the government to drastically slash the budget for funding universities and redirect it all to the war treasury. It's time the academics were seen for the horrible blackmail artists they really are. I'm absolutely tired of having to pay them off every time they make a discovery. We simply must formulate a plan to stomp them out permanently.

  But I suppose they do have their advantages. I have a few teams working on some very useful devices. There's one group that's created an ingenious mobile cancer ray. Once mounted into an ordinary van, it can project an invisible beam of radiation at any target we choose. It's so accurate that we can even choose the type of cancer to afflict the sap with. It's still in testing right now, but I have very high hopes for it, we've already used it a few dozen times on random targets, and it worked wonders on every one of them. There's only one prototype right now, but I wouldn't mind if you loaned it for a few days. I know how much you love your toys.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Senior Citizen

  The terrorist attack on our great nation, on our innocent little pups is unacceptable! The Nureongi have slaughtered our innocence, they've defiled our youth, and I for one, won't stand for it. I want justice. I want to see all their worthless pups die in retaliation. Little Nureongi corpses lining their scraggy forests as far as the eye can see!

  How dare they plant bombs in our schools? How dare they even look at an Orninican pup with their ugly twitchy eyes? They're going to pay in blood. I can't wait to see the news footage of them being massacred by our brave troops for what they've done to us today. The fact that we've let the damned mongrels live this long is testament to our great patience. But the time for patience is ended. I demand the military launches a full scale invasion of their pathetic little country immediately!

  The damned Progressive Conservative idiots are at it again with their hike in the tobacco tax when they still haven't seen to the damn immigrant problem. I don't mind paying taxes, but they need to make it worth our while. Why should I pay even more for my already expensive imported cigars when there are still immigrants flooding into the country everyday?

  I do hope we invade Nureongi, but couldn't they take the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone here? If they do the right thing and invade that useless savage country and take their oil, then I'll be cheering them on all the way, but the military should take all our damn foreigners with them. We're still fighting a war in our own backyard everyday against all the freeloading migrant workers moving in next door. They could easily sign them all up for military service and drop them onto the front lines. That would thin their numbers nicely.

  You know what the problem is, don't you? The foreigners take all the jobs and then our damn lazy youths, unemployed and fat with welfare checks, keep on voting for the damn Progressives. It's time the Reformist Conservatives came back into power and showed the lazy layabout youth of today what for. Old President Milt C. Rexworth would have never just stood by and watched these ungrateful loafs picking away at the rainy day fund with their greedy little mitts. Now there was a real President. Knew how to deal with so-called asylum seekers too, just kept them in detention cells for a few months, barely fed them, until they got sick of it and bought a flight back out.

  There was a cheeky migrant pup outside my house today, relieving himself on my petunias. I couldn't believe my eyes. When I told him he'd better get away from my property lest I call the drones in, he even had the gumption to tell me to go hump myself! The little punk didn't look so smug when I hit the panic button on my belt and a drone came out of the sky and grabbed him. Didn't even have time to do up his zipper, so his shorts floated down a few minutes later. Little pook. Took me hours to fix the mess he'd done to my flower patch. Trampled them good, he did. Should have seen the look on his face when he got yanked up. I was laughing about it with the boys at the club for hours afterwards.

  What I really can't stand is when little runts like that are running around the Kostsaver unsupervised, shouting and screaming and crashing into my trolley. There's nothing more annoying than having to hear a bunch of spoiled-rotten welfare pups screaming at the top of their lungs when you're trying to decide what brand of petroleum jelly to go with. If dogs can't look after their own kin, then let the government take them and put them in a facility or something. They'll keep them out of our way at least, even if we have to keep paying to feed the fat little gits everyday.

  The second thing I needed from the Kostsaver was weed killer, but they write the damn instructions in such tiny print that you'd need a microscope to read it. I had to just wing it. I had a look out the window earlier and the damn weeds don't look any deader, so I'll have to give them a stronger drenching later on. There's nothing uglier than big stringy weeds in a neat little flower bed.

  I just forwarded a joke someone sent me to everyone in my address book, it was the funniest thing I've ever read. Almost broke my spine laughing. Let me see if I can remember it... Something about a pook that got on an elevator... Oh, and there was a Soup monk that was looking at him funny, and the pook... No, the pook was looking at the Soup funny. And there was something about a flat tire. Oh, and a naked Rongi medicine man dancing about like a lunatic. Anyway, it was damn funny.

  A scruffy young insurance peddler knocked on my door this morning, wanting to sell me a sick joke of a policy. His shirt wasn't tucked in, his tie crooked, and he needed a good haircut. Now, I sat him down at my kitchen table, told him to listen up, and I shared with him everything I learned in the two years I spent, right out of college, as a strapping young insurance agent. How I was spectacularly dressed, shoes so shiny you could see your face in them, a brilliant smile, and above all else; impeccable manners.

  I mean, you don't come to someone's door all wishy washy, “Er... Do you wanna buy some boat insurance, Granddad?” What the hell is that? Didn't they give him any damned guidelines before setting him loose on a neighborhood that decent dogs live in? He kept making excuses, getting up, saying he had to go, and I kept sitting him right back down again until he listened and learned how to sell insurance the right way. I made him practice with me, and I went with him to the next house and watched and told him when he went wrong. He didn't learn a damn thing, though. Couldn't sell rain to the desert. Complete waste of my valuable time.

  I don't know, I really don't know what it is with youths. They're just not proper. Maybe we should send them all to war, teach them some real life skills. But they'll probably cry their little delicate eyes out for their mothers the moment a drill sergeant raises his voice a little bit. They're all a bunch of mopey money-holes, all of them.

  When I was their age, I had three full-time jobs and responsibilities up to my ears. You didn't ever see me lining up outside the welfare office, or paying for pornography and video-games with food stamps. I didn't have time for that nonsense, I had a wife and three pups to support. Even on weekends, I had a stall at the market selling flip flops during the day, and I operated the ferris wheel at the fair at night. I didn't even talk to my wife for years, I was so busy making scratch to f
eed her and the litter.

  Of course, neither her nor my damn offspring talk to me now, the ungrateful sods. Haven't seen any one of them for twenty-three years, since she left to paint trains or some nonsense. She was a whore anyway, always walking around in public with no bra under her dress. Feh.

  If they would just let me be in charge of the country for one full day, I'd fix this place right up, boy would I. I'd cram all the useless migrants on a big barge, push it out to sea, and blast it full of holes. I'd cut off all the unemployed layabouts welfare benefits, and see if a little old-fashioned starvation makes them get to work. I'd round up all the tree-huggers and pacifists and Nureongi sympathizers and drop them right in the middle of a Nureongi slum. We'll see how they like their precious savages when they're cooking them up in a big barbecue.

  As for the convicts, I'd put them all to work in the coal mines. Sixteen hours a day. We could fuel the whole country for pennies if they put more work on those prisoners plates. Forget about trying to teach them to read, just hand them pickaxes and shoot anyone that won't work.

  I tell you, make me president for a day and the country would be back to normal in no time. Then we'd all have a big parade with feisty little dancing girls, roasted marshmallows and corn on a cob, and a fine Orninican personality like Mr. Harvey Fidelbrook would take off his hat, firmly shake my hand and lead in reciting the glorious national anthem in my honor. The whole country would thank me for saving the Orninican dream. They'd name history books after me and teach little pups about my great leadership for generations. The man that saved Orninica when it was almost finished.

  But no, no one listens to Buster Smigle's ideas because I'm not college-educated. Well, excuse me for being too engaged with raising a litter of ungrateful little bonks to lounge about on a college campus all day learning about soppy philosophy and 'gender and feminist studies'. Bunch of malarkey. Damn lazy students.

  That's another thing President Smigle would do. I'd take away all the funding for useless waste of money programs like college scholarships. If you're too poor to go to college on your own dime, then shut up and get a proper working class job like the rest of us. Don't be expecting special treatment just because you scored high on a stupid exam. Here in the real world, there's no tests or term papers to make decisions for you. You just show up at a job and say “Yes sir. Right away sir.” That's all there is to it. It's not rocket science.

  I'd also do away with all that pointless 'save the environment' guff. If a factory needs to get rid of some waste, and they pay their taxes, then they can go right ahead and offload it on land no one's using. Damn tree-huggers don't own the planet. And so what if some of it gets into the rivers? Big deal. It's not gonna kill you, you pansies. You've gotta expect a little pollution if you're wanting to maintain a thriving industry and expand the market. These company managers have a lot of responsibilities on their heads as it is, they can't be spending all day stressing out about how they're going to get around thousands of government environmental regulations so they can actually do some business.

  No, if they gave me the power, I'd rescue this country in 24 hours flat. It's easy, I've got all the big-ticket issues down. Single mothers? Employ them as maids for the hard working rich. They can do it for just bread and board. Homosexuals? Shame them all into offing themselves. Could even enlist them and send them on suicide missions. That way they get to pay some penance before they die, and their lives wouldn't have been completely worthless. Feminists? Give them all boob jobs, great big ones. That'll change their tune, when males start paying attention to them for the first time. Fleas? Incinerate all the damn hamsters. It's sickening. Whenever I see a pup playing with a hamster in one of those stupid balls, I stamp on it with my boot until it's flat. Filthy disease-ridden animals. Or better yet, feed them to the homeless.

  The problem with the homeless is that they're too uppity. They're not satisfied with anything we give them. Here's an idea; when we gather up all the rich folks' refuse, instead of sending it over to the landfill, how about we send it over to the homeless shelters so they can pick through it first. And if they don't want to eat out of the garbage, then they shouldn't bloody well be homeless in the first place, should they? There's gotta be some first class leftovers to eat in the trash cans of the rich.

  We can let them eat the garbage for a while, so they get used to it and begin to trust it, and then after a couple months, we can sprinkle some cat poison in each trashcan and take care of the homeless problem once and for all, freeing up funding to be spent on more useful enterprises.

  Like for instance, we could double up on our drones, even replace all the old useless rubber-bullet models with the new elite assault-bots with the mounted missile launchers. Double the checkpoints too. A lot of times, I drive eight or nine blocks without going through a checkpoint, how is that enough coverage to stop a terrorist? Security is always prime. We could triple our nuke-arsenal, just in case any of our allies in the OOWD get out of line again with their pain-in-the-neck austerity protests. We can also always help out our invaluable corporations with some much-needed funds to further expand their operations. After security, the fluidity of the market must always be paramount.

  Another idea I have that would be really good for the country is creating a new tax to fund buying boats for retired seniors that have earned it. Sort of a reward for our tireless years of service in the military and as taxpayers. It would be a good way to stimulate the economy, since we'd need to buy drinks and food every time we go boating, and we could sell any excess fish we catch to restaurants.

  I always wanted to grow up to be a fisherman when I was a pup, but there wasn't much profit in it. You've got to act like a grown up when it comes down to it and let go of the dopey dreams you made when you were still a naive little git. So when I got out of the army and got married, I got a real job. But I would be really proud if the government gave me a little fishing boat for being such a fine upstanding Orninican all these years. Ask anyone and they'll tell you I've earned it.

  Now that we're most likely going to war with those ignorant yellow mongrels, I'm thinking a lot of dirt-cheap labor is about to flood into Orninica. Now, everyone knows I'm no friend of dirty immigrants, but the one exception I'll make is when it's a housekeeper / nurse. I figure I'll finally be able to afford one once the yellows flee their burning crater-filled lands with their tails between their legs and come running to civilization.

  If you're paying them next to nothing, it's not like they're taking jobs from Orninicans anyway. It's basically charity. But I tell you, if I get one of them working for me, I'm gonna make sure she scrubs herself clean three times a day. I'm not having some hoodoo savage stinking up my house. And she'll eat what I give her to eat and nothing more. Don't need her dragging some rotting vermin she trapped through the kitchen and pushing it into my oven. She'll learn to be civilized or I'll cast her back onto the street with the rest of the trash. Put my pop's old branding iron to use and brand her lazy thieving whore face so no one else gives her work.

  Actually, since yellows are a lesser species, I have to assume they're not protected by any of the laws that govern us. So it should be perfectly legal to put them down if they're found to be unfit. Won't have to pay them either in that case, so maybe I'll get a butler and a chef too. I've surely earned it, working my balls off for thirty years and paying my taxes. Never even missed a single mortgage payment.

  There's no doubt about it, the government should be giving all senior war veterans an Ongi slave girl or three, and a good-sized fishing boat. Especially those of us without wives to clean for us, and perform their bedroom duties. Seniors have needs too, damn it.

  Now, don't get me wrong. I'm perfectly capable of going out and meeting a nice classy Orninican lady. But then they all have this big list of expectations. They want you to pay for dinner, they expect you to dance even when your bunions are acting up, to flatter them even when they get old and lose their looks. They want you to talk to them and act lik
e you care about their useless day. And if I lose my temper because she's babbling on for twenty minutes about complete nonsense, and I give her a little smack with the back of my hand, she gets all out of sorts and calls the cops. Makes a big deal out of it for no good reason, bawling her eyes out, and makes me out to be some kind of criminal in front of the law. It's humiliating.

  No thank you, I've had enough of your entitled princesses with their fancy clothes and impossible expectations. I need a female that won't talk back, that can't even speak the language. Just cleans and cooks and pleases me in all the ways a proper wife is meant to. Bring me one of those and I'll be a happy dog. I won't even care that much if she's a yellow, just so long as she works at being civilized and keeps her mouth shut.

  Just yesterday, I was out front, watering my flower beds, and the prissy, fat single mother from next door pokes her head over the fence and asks me to keep an eye on her pup while she posts a letter down the street. Didn't even wait for a reply, just pushed the brat into my yard and trotted off. Apparently seniors have nothing better to do than babysit every little runt on the block. I watched the pup all right, watched him run right into the road. Got scraped a bit by a motorcycle, no big deal. But of course, he starts bawling and his mother comes running back and acts like it's my fault the dumb little crybaby ran into a motorcycle. It's natural selection, is all it is. You've got to let nature take care of the specimens with shit for brains so they don't end up polluting the gene pool.

  She needs to face reality; anyone dumb enough to run out into traffic like that doesn't deserve to live, and I'm the only one with the balls to say it. That little leech is going to grow up to be yet another whiny, jobless, Progressive Conservative voting, welfare-mooching whore. It's much more practical to weed them out before they start to cost us money down the road. You know I'm right.